Powell Joins Revolt of the Generals

Colin Powell and his former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, have begun their attack on the president.

Things must be looking much better for us in Iraq, so someone needed to provide a new diversion after the attention given to retired generals faded away. Powell and Wilkerson volunteered.

At least the people who wrote this description of events were candid about what was going on:

Associated Press
Updated: 7:41 p.m. ET April 30, 2006

WASHINGTON - Just back from Baghdad and eager to discuss promising developments, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice found herself knocked off message Sunday, forced to defend prewar planning and troop levels against an unlikely critic — Colin Powell, her predecessor at the State Department.

For the Bush administration, it was a rare instance of an in-house dissenter going public.

On Rice’s mind was the political breakthrough that had brought her and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to Iraq last week and cleared the way for formation of a national unity government.

Yet Powell sideswiped her by revisiting the question of whether the U.S. had a large enough force to oust Saddam Hussein and then secure the peace.

He said he advised Bush before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to send more troops to Iraq, but that the administration did not follow his recommendation.

Rather than look at what is happening right now in Iraq, Powell wants people to think about what was happening more than three years ago. What a guy!

Meanwhile, Powell's old chief of staff plays the role of mooncalf:

Is U.S. being transformed into a radical republic?

By Lawrence Wilkerson
Originally published April 23, 2006 [Published in today's Kitsap Sun]

We Americans came not from a revolution but from an evolution.

That is in large part why our so-called revolution produced success while most throughout history did not. We came as much from the Magna Carta as from our own doings, as much from British common law and parliamentary development as from the Declaration of Independence and Continental Congress.

Unlike the true revolution on the other side of the Atlantic that led to Napoleon's dictatorship and strife and conflict all across Europe, our evolution founded the greatest country the world has ever seen.

###

As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: "America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great - as happened to all great powers before it, without exception.

The statement Wilkerson attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville exists in no known writings of the man. How appropriate it was to place a "fake but accurate" quote in with the rest of Wilkerson's diatribe.

Note, too, that Wilkerson's dire prediction of the fall of the U.S. as a great power contains a truism which doesn't mean what he thinks it means. The fate of all previous great powers has no predictive value. All great powers have ceased to be great -- because nothing lasts forever on the Earth.

Wilkerson even includes the usual litany of false criticisms that every left winger can recite as easily as regular churchgoers can recite the Apostles' Creed:

From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.

Unprecedented interpretations of the Constitution that holds the president as commander in chief to be all-powerful and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism of this administration.

Wilkerson knows nothing -- not history and not current events. If he had included all of the spurious quotation, he would have revealed the difference between our revolution and that of the French (and Russians) -- adherence to Christianity produced the good in America, while hatred of religion (other than the quasi-religion of soclialism or communism) produced the bad in France (and Russia).

(Wilkerson doesn't even know English grammar. The last sentence in the above excerpt is a mess.)

Eleven years ago, I thought for a while that Powell might be a good president, but came to believe that he was not a true conservative. (That is to say, a person who knows and loves the ideals upon which this nation was founded, and therefore wants to retain them as its foundation.)

It seems I was more correct than I had imagined.